Powerhouse Brattørkaia – the World’s Northernmost Energy-Positive Building
The energy sector and building industry accounts for over 40 % of global industry’s heat-trapping emissions combined, according to the World Resources Institute. As the world’s population and the severity of the climate crisis continue to grow, we are challenged to think how to build responsibly – creating high quality spaces for people while also reducing our environmental footprint.
As the world’s northernmost energy-positive building, Powerhouse Brattørkaia aims to set a new standard for the construction of the buildings of tomorrow: one that produces more energy than it consumes over its lifespan, including construction and demolition. This also includes the embodied energy in the materials used to construct the building.
Powerhouse is a research, design and engineering collaboration of industry partners Entra, Skanska, ZERO, Snøhetta and Asplan Viak.
The waterfront façade is the slimmest face of the building, allowing the project to be read at a similar scale with its neighbors. Clad with black aluminum and solar panels, the façade is reflected in the adjacent Trondheim Fjord.
Powerhouse Brattørkaia is located in Trondheim, Norway, 63° north of the Earth’s equator, where sunlight varies greatly between the seasons. This presents a unique opportunity to explore how to harvest and store solar energy under challenging conditions.
The 18 000 m2 office building is situated by the harbor and connects to Trondheim Central Station via a pedestrian bridge on the rear end of the building.
On average, Powerhouse Brattørkaia produces more than twice as much electricity as it consumes daily, and will supply renewable energy to itself, its neighboring buildings, electric buses, cars and boats through a local micro grid.
The aim of the project is threefold; to maximize the amount of clean energy produced by the building, to minimize the energy required to run it, and to serve as a pleasant space for its tenants and the general public. The building’s site has been carefully chosen to ensure maximum exposure to the sun throughout the day and seasons. Its skewed, pentagonal roof and the upper part of the façade is clad with almost 3 000 m2 of solar panels, strategically placed to harvest as much solar energy as possible.
Over a year, this amounts to a total of about 500 000 kWh with clean, renewable energy. In effect, the building dually functions as a small power plant in the middle of the city. Ample space for energy storage is built into the building footprint, allowing it to store surplus energy in the summer months of near total daylight, to then use it in the winter months when daylight is at a minimum.
The building’s structural system consists of thermal mass – low-emission concrete – which is exposed through strategic cutouts in the ceiling.
The mass absorbs and retains heat and cold and helps regulate the temperature in the building without using electricity.
The building is extremely energy efficient, leveraging a series of technologies to radically reduce energy use for its daily operations. This is accomplished through insulating the building for maximum efficiency, installing intelligent solutions for air flow to reduce the need for heating, heat recovery solutions for ventilating air and greywater (wastewater from all sources except toilets), using seawater for heating and cooling and implementing only energy efficient electrical appliances. Daylight conditions are optimized throughout the building design and artificial light use is kept at a minimum.
For its efforts, Powerhouse Brattørkaia has received the BREEAM Outstanding certification, the highest possible ranking by the world’s leading sustainability assessment method for an asset’s environmental, social and economic sustainability performance. Its solutions support the UNFCCC Paris Agreement that pursues efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Within this illuminated core is an atrium that functions as a public garden with horizontal glass windows on the sides, providing skylight into the below canteen. This skewed lightwell allows daylight to enter the building on every floor, and gives the people working inside a great view of the city.
Large glass windows and pleasant open spaces flooded with daylight contribute a comfortable and inviting work environment. The tenants have a panoramic view of the Trondheim Fjord and Munkholmen from the office spaces.
For humans to continue to live and thrive on this planet, and in the buildings we inhabit and spend most of our lives in, these need to be built with as much consideration for natural preservation and energy efficiency as for the comfort of the people inside them.
As the world’s northernmost energy-positive building, Powerhouse Brattørkaia is setting an example for responsibly constructing our homes and office spaces for the future.
